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26 March 2015

Sugar beet: harvesting and picking up

We are going to speak about another crop which is not planted in our area: sugar beet. Even today, we can remember how some farmers worked the sugar beet about 20 years ago when, in general, this crop was profitable in Spain. We spent a really interesting day visiting a company in Íscar (Valladolid) which works this crop.

This company owns two tractors to take out and clean the sugar beet. The Fendt 718 as you can see in our pictures and a Valtra (it was not working that day). As workers told us, the Valtra works better than Fendt in this job because their Valtra tractor has a powershift gearbox and it is more advisable than Vario and TMS system... of course, Fendt is more comfortable. The tractor has a harvesting tool of 6 rows that is equipped with a hydraulic system to modify its position on hills.

The ​​Gilles RB410T Automat​ ​harvesters has a tank capacity of 20 tons in order to work a long time without being downloaded. They can harvest a lot of hectares per day (the working speed is about 9 km/h) and the harvesting price is 300€/ha... farmers said this harvesting system is profitable now.